For some companies, business process automation (BPA) can seem scary at first. You might worry that it takes too much time to set up or that it requires hiring additional personnel, but that's not true. Automation is a powerful tool your team can use to be more efficient. It streamlines workload so your employees can be more productive to a higher standard with less effort.
As BPA impacts the global workforce, businesses that adopt it are predicted to dominate their industries. Even simple automation tools like "away from the office" messages on emails help employees avoid repetitive actions, especially in terms of communicating with clients and co-workers and other vital business functions That way, they can focus on more important duties and improve upon the daily work grind.
Companies have taken BPA a step further by embracing virtual agents, customer self-service solutions, marketing automation, and forms of next-generation artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning. With such powerful capabilities, automation has catalysed modern business processes and has driven companies to continue augmenting data capture to enhance automation capabilities.
In other words, BPA can be the key to meeting the increasing demands for your business to perform complex, labour-intensive tasks. Here's how your company can benefit:
Boost employee productivity, morale, and retention
Many people fear BPA but it actually eliminates the tedious tasks and frees up thinly spread employees to fulfill more substantial work. When your employees are more productive in doing more substantial work, it results in satisfaction and, ultimately, employee retention.
For example, a firm that uses AI-enabled automation to streamline their hiring process can easily sort through resumes submitted through their websites. This allows them to identify potential candidates with ease as opposed to having the company's HR team spend two-thirds of their time manually sorting through the resumes.
Streamline chaotic workflows and processes
As your business grows, the more chaotic processes and workflows can get. Data-driven marketing teams have to deal with metrics and analytics, but with BPA, there is improved segmentation, better lead-scoring, probability-based customer mapping, and more impactful campaigns. In this scenario, you focus more on refining your marketing strategies.
Increase visibility
Reporting and status updates such as annual and quarterly reports can take up a lot of time. With automated reports, there's less room to cover up mistakes and it’s much easier to identify areas that need improvement. You can also track an item in the workflow that can be useful for capacity planning and deadline management. Increased transparency leads to better business decisions, and it can prevent unethical or illegal behaviour.
Document management
BPA allows you to skip paper chase thanks to a combined document management system, which reduces the time employees spend filing and retrieving documents. In the long run, customers will enjoy better service when employees have real-time and immediate access to information and process status.
Business insight
A good BPA helps you analyse business trends, identify repeat bottlenecks, and track response times. You can determine new process requests to initiate, trigger most missed deadlines alerts, or you can determine new process points, processes to terminate without completion, and common failure points, as well as trigger most missed deadlines alerts and common failure points to improve.
Is your company looking for protocols to increase efficiency? If so, it’s time to assess your workflow. Take a step back and create a comprehensive inventory of your data processing analytics to see if your costs are exorbitant and if delays can be reduced. Total Calibration’s BPA solutions equip you with Nintex’s and Microsoft’s best automation apps. To learn more, give us a call now and we’ll take you through your first BPA steps.
